‘MUMFORD” is just delightful, the kind of movie that leaves you with a big silly grin on your face.

Sure, it’s as sappy and predictable and implausible as any 1940s comedy. And it’s based on one of those vaguely sappy, New-Agey Hollywood premises: A person who listens and really cares is as good a healer as any trained psychotherapist.

But it doesn’t matter. “Mumford” is a crowd-pleasing ensemble piece, whose story goes exactly where you want it to. And it’s perfectly executed by a fine cast under Lawrence Kasdan’s deft direction.

Dr. Mumford (Loren Dean, who uncannily resembles a young Charles Grodin) has recently set up shop as a shrink in a small town, also named Mumford. He’s actually a fraud without any training in psychology. Still, his clients like him because he’s attentive, unusually frank and completely without professional arrogance.

He’s a placid fellow, leading a pleasant enough life. He has more clients than the town’s other two shrinks put together. One of the clients, Skip Skipperton (Jason Lee) is a skateboarding, twentysomething computer billionaire, on whom the local economy depends.

He’s so lonely he’s making a female android in his lab, although he does have an eye for Dr. Mumford’s friend and neighbor Lily (Alfre Woodard).

Among Mumford’s other clients are an overweight pharmacist (Pruitt Taylor Vince) whose sexual fantasies have wrecked his marriage, and a promiscuous, anorexic high school girl addicted to fashion magazines (Zooey Deschanel).

There’s also Althea (Mary McDonnell), whose unhappy marriage to a ruthless big businessman (Ted Danson) has triggered an overwhelming compulsion to order expensive things by mail.

Feeling guilty because he’s been indiscreet, telling Skip about his other clients, Mumford reveals to him that he’s not really a shrink. Things don’t get complicated until Mumford takes on the case of Sofie (Hope Davis), a young woman with one of those fatigue-causing illnesses.

As part of her therapy, he takes her for walks and listens to her like no one has listened to her before. It works, but as she starts to feel better Mumford realizes that he is falling in love with her.

At the same time, Lionel Dillard (Martin Short) a client Mumford turned away because he was so obnoxious, has begun to investigate his background.

Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, began his career with “Body Heat” and “The Big Chill.” Some of his later work like “Grand Canyon” and “French Kiss” has been too preachy or saccharine or both. But here he ensures that scenes that could have been clich come off as charming and sweet.

Part of Kasdan’s recipe for success is in allowing the cast to make the most of small, sharply written roles, without letting any of them overwhelm the film’s balance.

There’s a price to be paid in that some of the performers have too little time on screen, particularly David Paymer, newcomer Deschanel, and Woodard, the beautiful and talented actress who should have won an Oscar for her work in “Passion Fish.”

But Hope Davis deserves much of credit for making “Mumford” work. She’s one of those screen presences who looks like a normal person, yet grips your attention as completely as any of the industry’s glamour queens.